The Iceman

A distinctly average entry in the persistent 1970s mafia movie sub-genre (see ‘Goodfellas’, ‘Donnie Brasco’, ‘American Gangster’), ‘The Iceman’ comes packed with clichés: washed-out colours, rainy streets, distracting facial hair, tan leather jackets and Ray Liotta. Luckily, one of America’s more interesting younger actors, Michael Shannon (‘Mud’), plays Richard Kuklinski, a Polish-American in New Jersey whose emotion-free, psychopathic tendencies caught the eye of the Mob. Soon he was their go-to-guy for no-questions-asked slayings. We follow Kuklinski over two decades of hits as, in parallel, he holds down a life in the suburbs. Winona Ryder plays Kuklinski’s in-the-dark wife, so allowing for the perennial crime-versus-family conflict that drives so many of these tales. It’s lifted by a string of colourful side roles played by the likes of James Franco, David Schwimmer and Stephen Dorff. But even the always-watchable Shannon can’t give much life to Kuklinski’s two-dimensional presence: he’s little more than a series of murders and pained looks.